Trump’s shiny new attack on US citizens stands on shaky legal ground

The New York Times, on April 23, reported that the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is ramping up its push to denaturalize U.S. citizens — and more than 300 are being targeted.

The New Republic's Matt Ford, in an article published on April 29, describes the Trump DOJ's denaturalization push as "concerning" but lays out some reasons why it is on shaky legal ground.

"The (Trump) administration's denaturalization threats often provoke a strong response from the president's opponents and critics," Ford explains. "But it is also important to calibrate one's level of concern by understanding what the Trump administration can and can't do about denaturalization in the first place. For one thing, the Trump administration cannot denaturalize a natural-born citizen — that is, someone who acquired citizenship at birth by virtue of being born on U.S. soil or by being born to a U.S. citizen."

Ford continues, "The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, which was enacted during Reconstruction in 1869, sought to place the scope of American citizenship beyond the limits of normal political debate for all time."

Ford stresses that the U.S. has "strict legal and constitutional limits on when and how" a "naturalized U.S. citizen" can be denaturalized.

"During the first Red Scare in the late 1910s, for example, the Wilson Administration targeted Russian-American anarchist activist Emma Goldman for her anti-war and anti-conscription efforts," Ford notes. "Federal officials invalidated her husband's naturalized citizenship for alleged fraud, then argued that her acquisition of citizenship through marriage to him was now invalid as well. She accepted deportation to the newly founded Soviet Union in 1919."

Ford adds, "In the late 1930s, Congress and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sought to clarify when and how someone could lose their U.S. citizenship. The Nationality Act of 1940 was drafted to harmonize dozens of different provisions that had been enacted piecemeal over the preceding decades. In the new law, Congress laid out a variety of circumstances in which a U.S. citizen could be deemed to have renounced their U.S. citizenship."

Denaturalization, according to Ford, is not impossible — but is a much heavier than Trump claims.

"If the (U.S. Supreme) Court were to weaken birthright citizenship in any way, even as some sort of internal compromise to reject Trump's executive order," Ford observes, "it would fundamentally alter this entire legal and constitutional calculus…. If the Supreme Court stands its ground, then the Trump administration's denaturalization campaign will remain firmly constrained by law and precedent as well."